DANIEL BRYAN INTRODUCES THE NEW GENERAL MANAGER OF 205 LIVE- Um… aren’t the Cruiserweights technically part of the Raw brand? So shouldn’t Steph or Kurt be making this announcement?
Before that, though, he buries the booking of the show, saying that this new GM will let the Cruiserweights give us “the action they always should have: and “the action you want.” And just who is this new GM, you ask?
It’s DRAKE MAVERICK, that’s who!
Who is Drake Maverick, you ask? Why he’s TNA’s Rockstar Spud, of course. And I say “of course” because who else would possibly come up with a name like “Drake Maverick” in 2018? In fact, the thing I like the most about this is that I can totally see the Rockstar Spud character we knew from TNA having read the job description that WWE put out and saying, “yes, I have all of this experience generally managing things for Mrs. Carter, but WWE will never hire me if I don’t have a cool name, so he sat on his couch for two hours trying to come up with the single coolest name he could think of, and he settled on “Drake Maverick.”
But if I would have one complaint about this…
Spud is known for his famous collection of weirdly-colored suits. They couldn’t find him a purple one to match the 205 Live color scheme?

DRAKE MAVERICK ANNOUNCEMENT- we’re having a six-teen man tournament, culminating at WrestleMania, to crown a new WWE Cruiserweight Champion. The tournament will start tonight with Cedric Alexander vs. Gran Metalik and Tyler Bate vs. TJP. I really like how Drake is coming off like a fight promoter here. Not as good as Dario Cueto, but he’s a lot more like Dario Cueto than anyone else in wrestling.

WWE CRUISERWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT FIRST ROUND MATCH: Cedric Alexander vs. Gran Metalik- 6.5/10
Cedric cut an in-set phone promo. The promo itself was good, but it would have been a million times better if it looked like it had been produced professionally and not recorded in a messy apartment.
Cedric wins a good wrestling match.

TYLER BATE VIDEO PACKAGE- It’s the same one they always have, but they tried to disguise it by replacing th3e indy clips with WWE clips.

JACK GALLAGHER PROMO- he thinks Drake Maverick will favor him because they’re both English. He managed to disguise the fact that he did this on his fine.

MUSTAFA ALI PROMO- it’s not on his phone! Hooray!
This was a decent promo where he put over the importance of winning rather than having a good match.

DASHA FUENTES INTERVIEWS TJP- Who let Dasha on camera with that ridiculous eye-grabbing, piece of bling? I spent this whole time wondering what that was supposed to be. It was like she was wearing a tiara around her neck. It looked very dumb.
The rest of this segment was good, though. TJ insisted that Dasha refer to him as “the first ever WWE Cruiserweight Champion” and Drake Maverick showed up and told TJ that “that was a long time ago” and he needs to stop resting on his laurels because “it’s a new day on 205 Live.”

TOZAWA PHONE PROMO- not only was this a phone promo, but he also seems to think that the tournament is to decide who the new General Manager will be, and threatens to fire a random person backstage. It goes without saying that it’s idiotic that they have decided that he now has to be crazy and/or stupid, and be mean to random people backstage, so instead I’m going to point out that the fact that this was hot on his phone meant that unless you were paying attention to his arm’s occasional flailing in and out of the picture in the background, you wouldn’t have noticed that he was doing Vince’s powerwalk. This is a new2 low for these phone promos, as they have now progressed from simply looking bad to actually getting in the way of being able to show us thing we’re supposed to notice, and all because Vince and Dunn think this makes the show more relatable to teenagers and millennials or whatever other silly excuse they have for doing this.

WWE CRUISERWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT FIRST ROUND MATCH: Tyler Bate vs. TJP- 8.25/10
If Nakamura is the “King of Strong Style” and Tyler Bate has “British Strong Style” on his tights, does that means he owes Nakamura fealty?
These two had an awesome match with great storytelling and limb-work. TJP picked up the win in the end with a roll-up and a handful of tights.

A great show from 205 Live, and I have high hopes for next week as well because next week we’re getting Lincé Dorado vs. Kalisto and Roderick Strong vs. Hideo Itami!